Lightroom Tutorial | Applying Develop Presets on Import

Lightroom Tutorial | Applying Develop Presets on Import

One of the reasons I love being a part of The Digi Show is that people will listen to the show and zero in on something that one of us said (as we were rambling on – AS WE DO) and then they’ll ask for further explanation in the show comments.

Which brings me to another reason that I love being a part of The Digi Show: I love reading and responding to the show comments every week. The side conversations and listener tips and tricks are just as interesting as what we discussed on the show.

I have learned more, adapted more and grown more as a memory keeper (and human being) in the months that I’ve been on The Digi Show panel than I did over the several years prior. I am constantly discovering new ways to do things and look at things as a result of our weekly discussions.

<end shameless ass kissing>

Applying a develop preset to my photos as I import them into Lightroom is something I sort of glossed over in Episode 30 when we were answering some listener mail about the role Lightroom plays in our creative process. By request I recorded a short video tutorial on what I was referring to during that segment.

This one little step saves me a ton of time whenever I’m transferring photos from one of our cameras to my computer.

One thing I neglected to mention in the video: the edits in Lightroom are non-destructive, for those of you new to the program. There’s no risk involved in me letting Lightroom take a stab at auto-correcting my exposure as it transfers each image to my hard drive. If it goes haywire and leaves me with an image that’s way underexposed or way overexposed, I can just fine tune the settings in the Develop module myself and fix what it messed up. None of the Lightroom adjustments are written to the file unless I export that image so my original, straight out of camera (SOOC) image is still perfectly intact on my hard drive – in all its underexposed glory!

Just as a general note, I take the majority of photos on my D50 in full manual mode, and there was one series of photos I took back in January where I managed to get the exposure exactly spot on according to Lightroom’s auto-tone algorithm, meaning that after running the auto-tone preset it didn’t move the exposure setting a single decimal point to the right or left. At first I was like “Why is my auto-tone preset broken?” because that NEVER happens. Then when I realized that I had gotten the exposure perfect in the camera you would have thought I just stumbled upon the formula for a calorie-free cupcake.

I was like a golfer who just scored a hole in one. I jumped up out of my chair and did a fist pump and hissed out a triumphant “Yessssssssss!” For that brief, shining moment … I was the Tiger Woods of proper exposure.

These are the kinds of things that make my skirt fly up at this stage in my life.

Note: I have not achieved this same level of photographic serendipity since.

14 Comments

Ahh Peppermint, I’ve only just started listening to TDD and love it! I”m hoping to work my way backwards and catch up on what i’ve missed so far. I love it that you girls talk about so many other and different dimensions to digital scrapbooking, things i’ve never heard of and so keen to powerup my mac and give a go. Because of your lightroom discussion the other night, i’ve DL Lightroom 4 Beta and am having a play with it. I’m definately going to look into the whole importing preset thing and watch your video.
Note: I have not ever achieved any level of photographic serendipity. LOL ;)

After ordering a new hair brush for myself and my god-daughter who has curly long hair, I started to think that perhaps you’d punk’d us…just testing to see if you could get listeners to buy almost anything! I did feel a little silly explaining to my partner that I bought a new hairbrush because I heard about it on a digital scrapbooking podcast…it hasn’t arrived yet, but then we’ll know for sure!

Woohoo! WTG Tiger :) A photographer friend of mine taught me Develop presets when we were working together on several shoots (I was helping organize his LR catalog because we were taking photos of something like 400 people, ak!) So his camera was tethered to his laptop and in LR he had his own exposure presets up. It took a few more seconds for images to import because LR would add the preset while it was happening, but all in all it saved me a TON of time (because I was also doing the post-prod work on them).

Thanks for the tutorial Peppermint (BTW, my 14 year thinks your mom ROCKS for naming you Peppermint and why didn’t I do something creative like that…her knew nickname is now Peppermint! My 6 years old on the other hand is obsessed w/ Glitter Girl, Shimelle Laine…forget barbies she wants a glitter girl. You Ladies on the digi show rock! Thanks for getting me hooked on lightroom. I have it, felt overwhelmed by it and went back to using my simple program of memory manager by creative memories. Love the idea of actions etc. so I’m going to do some tutorials. I really wanted to say this was a great tutorial. It gave us an incite into the program w/o too much to distract us from the lesson. I’m a die hard paper scrapper but am now doing some hybrid and the show is a wealth of information on all topics. ty

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